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Exit, Carefully
It's Christmas Eve, 1988. Nineteen-year-old Beth takes a Greyhound from Cincinnati to Columbus to stay the night with her mother Linda, and Linda's alcoholic, charismatic, and combative boyfriend Gary. Beth's grandmother, recently widowed and ready to manipulate, drunkenly, for whatever she wants, completes the family gathering. Beth hasn't told any of them that she flunked out of school months ago, nor that she may be in trouble. In Linda and Gary's cramped two-bedroom apartment, Exit, Carefully--sometimes a dark comedy, sometimes a familial drama--follows twenty-four hours of family intoxication, hands of Euchre, minor acts of violence, and desperate acts of love, as each person learns just how hard it can be to walk out the door.
127 pages, Paperback
Published April 2, 2021
2 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Ellen
34 books83 followersElizabeth Ellen's stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals over the last ten years, including elimae, Quick Fiction, Hobart, Lamination Colony, Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, and many others. She is the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and her collection of flash fictions, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, was included in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women (Rose Metal Press). Fast Machine is a collection of her best work from the last decade. She was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story "Teen Culture" which appeared in American Short Fiction in 2012. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she co-edits Hobart and oversees Hobart's book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 2, 2021
Personally, reading plays doesn’t always light the same fire as prose, often veering toward more of an exercise in narrative structure than an experience. Elizabeth Ellen, however, has written a drastic exception. Exit, Carefully is what real dialogue provides— a stable of irrefutable characters. People who at first appear so fucked up seamlessly become too familiar. They unearth a little more of themselves with the words that cannot help but come out.
The stage directions are experimental, almost cursed. The setting is sparse, the wit is sharp. But the play’s greatest strength is in capturing the frustration of a young person and the world’s insistence on what that young person does not know about it. The main character Beth’s particular struggle as the youngest of three generations of women provides the only voice who can get that pain across. It reads like a scream. Audience members will recall with fear that same ache of needing to be heard, knowing that it never quite goes away.
Time well spent. A palatal cleanse. This one will drag you into the dark and force your eyes to adjust.
The stage directions are experimental, almost cursed. The setting is sparse, the wit is sharp. But the play’s greatest strength is in capturing the frustration of a young person and the world’s insistence on what that young person does not know about it. The main character Beth’s particular struggle as the youngest of three generations of women provides the only voice who can get that pain across. It reads like a scream. Audience members will recall with fear that same ache of needing to be heard, knowing that it never quite goes away.
Time well spent. A palatal cleanse. This one will drag you into the dark and force your eyes to adjust.
June 22, 2021
Exit, Carefully by Elizabeth Ellen is very, very good. Go buy it, read it, and hope that it gets produced in a theater near you one day.
I’d like to share a little bit about why it’s very, very good.
Great theater comes at you from multiple angles, and Exit, Carefully is no exception. The dialogue is real, the characters believable, and unlike a good number of works composed for the stage, this play doesn’t overstay its welcome. Ellen has a good eye for variety, giving us solos, duets and group set pieces that crackle (looking at you, euchre scene).
By way of quick introduction: the play is the story of Beth as she visits her family for Christmas. Packed into this small holiday space is Beth’s mother Linda, Linda’s boyfriend Gary and Gigi, Beth’s grandmother. The play’s introduction provides us with a detailed setting — Linda’s “small, standard, two bedroom, midwestern apartment”, but I could easily envision this playing out in a black box theater setting. Exit, Carefully pushes you close to the undercurrent between Ellen’s characters and an ambitious production has a lot to play with here.
This is a play, I think, about generations, the painful interplay, how experience memory forms and passes from one to the next, how each successive generation grapples with the former. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of the many great ways Ellen stages this dynamic — again, go read the thing — I’d like to hone in on a very fine example, my favorite, that I think puts Exit, Carefully in a select category of new plays that grapple with this age-old topic.
Scene 3 brings us Gigi, Beth’s grandmother. She churns the storm that drives the play onward and, well, I can imagine many an audience member or reader will recognize this particular figure. She’s the last addition to a quartet of characters that feel real.
Anyway: a few pages into the scene, Beth presents the war diary of her grandfather, Papa Jack. Beth reads passages to Gigi, who confesses that she never knew about the diary, in which Jack waxes about his deep longing for his wife. Gigi then says that she no longer has the letters Jack sent her, telling Beth: “Oh, I kept them a while, but I don’t have them now. I don’t know what happened to them.”
Then we get this marvelous moment:
BETH. But were you in love with him?
GIGI. (Face changes again, the skin around her mouth tightens, she suddenly seems to be slurring her words a little.) With your grandfather? With Jack? No, honey I don’t think I ever was.
BETH. (Face falls, crushed; not having parents of her own, her grandfather being the only father she’s ever known, she wants desperately for his love for her grandmother to be reciprocated. She needs it to be. To know the world is an ok and honest place.) You weren’t? Are you sure? Maybe you just don’t remember. Most of my friends, after they break up with a guy, claim they never loved him, even though at the time they went on and on, gushing, about…
GIGI. No, I know I wasn’t. I know I wasn’t, darlin.
Gigi continues, when asked why she married Jack, tells Beth that “that’s just what a woman did, then, honey.”
There’s much to love about this passage. For starters, it shatters what one might call a generational belief held by Beth that, when challenged, is meant to be physically and psychologically devastating. “Crushed,” as Ellen instructs in the text.
It’s also a moment of tremendous, tragic silence. Silence in theater is a potent tool. Dangerous one in the wrong hands — a moment can play off as powerful or awkward depending on the performers. Ellen presents a prime opportunity here for a great actress to navigate “she needs it to be...to know the world is an ok and honest place” while holding a stage object (the diary) that has shifted from light to dark in terms of its significance. Gigi as well, when her face falls, her ability to speak is almost lost for a moment. At the risk of rambling on here, I’d again highlight the potential for a black box production or another form of theatrical presentation that maximizes the intimacy between audience and performer.
This isn’t the only hinge moment in the play (far from it), but I think this particular one highlights Ellen’s strong instincts as a playwright.
A thought on the monologues: I wasn’t wild about them on my first read-through. I think this boils down to personal preference, mostly. The monologues work in Exit, Carefully, and are fresh moments for the performers to shine. I don’t think Exit, Carefully would fail without them, and I’d posit that it’s during the group set-pieces or some of the one-on-one scenes where the writing really shines.
But on successive read-throughs, I (in what is likely a wild assumption) started to feel them click with me. Breaking the fourth wall, establishing context, setting the scene — these are long-held theatrical techniques. They build a sense of place and time in which Exit, Carefully operates alongside its more timeless qualities, opening the door. I started to think that the play is engaging in a conversation with the foundations for how good theater works.
I feel like this review doesn’t touch on the many other great aspects of Exit, Carefully, but I don’t want to spoil it for any prospective reader. As I said in the introduction: buy it, read it, and, hopefully, one day see it live.
I’d like to share a little bit about why it’s very, very good.
Great theater comes at you from multiple angles, and Exit, Carefully is no exception. The dialogue is real, the characters believable, and unlike a good number of works composed for the stage, this play doesn’t overstay its welcome. Ellen has a good eye for variety, giving us solos, duets and group set pieces that crackle (looking at you, euchre scene).
By way of quick introduction: the play is the story of Beth as she visits her family for Christmas. Packed into this small holiday space is Beth’s mother Linda, Linda’s boyfriend Gary and Gigi, Beth’s grandmother. The play’s introduction provides us with a detailed setting — Linda’s “small, standard, two bedroom, midwestern apartment”, but I could easily envision this playing out in a black box theater setting. Exit, Carefully pushes you close to the undercurrent between Ellen’s characters and an ambitious production has a lot to play with here.
This is a play, I think, about generations, the painful interplay, how experience memory forms and passes from one to the next, how each successive generation grapples with the former. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of the many great ways Ellen stages this dynamic — again, go read the thing — I’d like to hone in on a very fine example, my favorite, that I think puts Exit, Carefully in a select category of new plays that grapple with this age-old topic.
Scene 3 brings us Gigi, Beth’s grandmother. She churns the storm that drives the play onward and, well, I can imagine many an audience member or reader will recognize this particular figure. She’s the last addition to a quartet of characters that feel real.
Anyway: a few pages into the scene, Beth presents the war diary of her grandfather, Papa Jack. Beth reads passages to Gigi, who confesses that she never knew about the diary, in which Jack waxes about his deep longing for his wife. Gigi then says that she no longer has the letters Jack sent her, telling Beth: “Oh, I kept them a while, but I don’t have them now. I don’t know what happened to them.”
Then we get this marvelous moment:
BETH. But were you in love with him?
GIGI. (Face changes again, the skin around her mouth tightens, she suddenly seems to be slurring her words a little.) With your grandfather? With Jack? No, honey I don’t think I ever was.
BETH. (Face falls, crushed; not having parents of her own, her grandfather being the only father she’s ever known, she wants desperately for his love for her grandmother to be reciprocated. She needs it to be. To know the world is an ok and honest place.) You weren’t? Are you sure? Maybe you just don’t remember. Most of my friends, after they break up with a guy, claim they never loved him, even though at the time they went on and on, gushing, about…
GIGI. No, I know I wasn’t. I know I wasn’t, darlin.
Gigi continues, when asked why she married Jack, tells Beth that “that’s just what a woman did, then, honey.”
There’s much to love about this passage. For starters, it shatters what one might call a generational belief held by Beth that, when challenged, is meant to be physically and psychologically devastating. “Crushed,” as Ellen instructs in the text.
It’s also a moment of tremendous, tragic silence. Silence in theater is a potent tool. Dangerous one in the wrong hands — a moment can play off as powerful or awkward depending on the performers. Ellen presents a prime opportunity here for a great actress to navigate “she needs it to be...to know the world is an ok and honest place” while holding a stage object (the diary) that has shifted from light to dark in terms of its significance. Gigi as well, when her face falls, her ability to speak is almost lost for a moment. At the risk of rambling on here, I’d again highlight the potential for a black box production or another form of theatrical presentation that maximizes the intimacy between audience and performer.
This isn’t the only hinge moment in the play (far from it), but I think this particular one highlights Ellen’s strong instincts as a playwright.
A thought on the monologues: I wasn’t wild about them on my first read-through. I think this boils down to personal preference, mostly. The monologues work in Exit, Carefully, and are fresh moments for the performers to shine. I don’t think Exit, Carefully would fail without them, and I’d posit that it’s during the group set-pieces or some of the one-on-one scenes where the writing really shines.
But on successive read-throughs, I (in what is likely a wild assumption) started to feel them click with me. Breaking the fourth wall, establishing context, setting the scene — these are long-held theatrical techniques. They build a sense of place and time in which Exit, Carefully operates alongside its more timeless qualities, opening the door. I started to think that the play is engaging in a conversation with the foundations for how good theater works.
I feel like this review doesn’t touch on the many other great aspects of Exit, Carefully, but I don’t want to spoil it for any prospective reader. As I said in the introduction: buy it, read it, and, hopefully, one day see it live.
May 15, 2021
Exit, Carefully emotionally eviscerated me. It dragged my soul out of my body and forced it into the light of day. It left me heartbroken, but undoubtedly clearer. Set on Christmas Day in the late 1980's Exit Carefully follows the story of one small cobbled together family (three generations of women and a mother's boyfriend). It is an expert display of power dynamics. Elizabeth Ellen understands the interplay of love and cruelty. Elizabeth Ellen understands that love can always double as resent or denial. Much of the dynamics hinge on what I would consider to be an ultimate familial truth. Whatever ammunition you have, you will use.
"I said to her, “Look, I may not have been the best mom in the world, but I sure had a good time!” And how many people can say that? At the end of their lives?
"I said to her, “Look, I may not have been the best mom in the world, but I sure had a good time!” And how many people can say that? At the end of their lives?
June 6, 2021
The characterization of each of these characters was incredible. I really enjoyed how each one had their own voice and how easy it was to tell them apart. While reading plays, I sometimes get confused on who is talking because I'm so caught up in the dialogue. This play didn't have that problem at all. In fact, as the play went on, it got easier to pick up on patterns with the characters' emotions. How quickly a sweet moment could turn sour.
The three generations of women were my favorite part. How each of them had their own unique perspective that clashed with either the other two. It was so specific that it showed how much the daughter's generation had evolved from the grandmother's generation. All of these women grew up at different times with different expectations and aspirations.
While there were some hard conversations, they're conversations that are often not talked about but are apart of the human experience no matter how shameful they might be. These characters have no shame and are clearly comfortable letting there feelings be heard.
The three generations of women were my favorite part. How each of them had their own unique perspective that clashed with either the other two. It was so specific that it showed how much the daughter's generation had evolved from the grandmother's generation. All of these women grew up at different times with different expectations and aspirations.
While there were some hard conversations, they're conversations that are often not talked about but are apart of the human experience no matter how shameful they might be. These characters have no shame and are clearly comfortable letting there feelings be heard.
July 21, 2022
Haven’t read a play (without acting it) since high school! Great exp. I actually also just finished either/or by elif batuman and this was also kind of about the aesthetic life and whether it depends on having disempowering relationships w men… w vastly different tone and situation ofc. I thought the portrayal of a downwardly mobile family was rly interesting. I liked the monologues and wished there were more formal flourishes and such, thought there was a bit too much exposition in the dialogue
May 17, 2021
The best and scariest part of this play was discovering the fact that I have had these conversations but never knew it. And I could be any of the characters at one point or another in my life. Kudos.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews